Tools, Dials & unexpected Levers

Beauty

For “Love at first sight“, we French say “Un coup de foudre” (a lightning strike), a clear metaphor? Bzam!! Like it?

We’ve all been there, I suppose : you walk your life seriously, and in a second you are suddenly, completely amazed by a face, a smile, someone. Look at you, now!…

If a love story ensues, well, you know… it doesn’t work “that” often. And many grown adults are very cautious with this love-at-first-sight thing. “Beware!”, says the 40 to the 20…

In a way, that’s pretty logical. Love at first sight means – and implies – you fell in love with… graphic proportions. You fell in love with some eyes, a mouth, a face… right?

And, well, graphic proportions are NOT a person.

OK. Yes. Right. But…

First of all, you can’t do nothing against a loveatfirstsightcrush. Just shut up and notice how stupid you become, haha.

So…

There’s a place where you’re a grown adult. You’ve been hurt by failures and break ups, blah blah blah, and you tend to think :

“As it ought to be, love at first sight is bullshite, therefore I should choose my lover with a good dose of reason”.

A person you appreciate “reasonably“, right?

Good!

But you grow more up. You gain experience. You’ve known many more people. Your brain is, like, trained to guess who is a person you meet. Watch her/him walk, talk, smile…

Voilà.

My theory here is : I am pretty sure that “Love at first sight”, when you’re 40 or 50, is more… accurate. You don’t fall in love in a second because of a smile, a winking eye, a silver voice. You DO, but because you guessfelt – much more : the rest of the person, the way (s)he talks, the way (s)he walks, stands up, questions you, looks at you. Energy.

You silly poor little brother, sister, you can’t resist (you will never be able to resist) to this “BAM!” feeling. Your whole personality seems to be ready to fall on your ass because of. That’s how we’re built, probably. There’s maybe an agent in our mind, doing this, keeping an eye out for…

Crush. Let go. Try to be smart, though. Hold on your wheel. Be happy. And if you’re not, you know, you have these “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” quotes, etc…

After all, maybe a good part of REASON is now incrusted, embedded into your loveatfirstsightness? It would be a strange effective braid, right?

“Physical beauty plays here exactly the same role as nobility of blood in the Ancien Régime, and the brief consciousness that they might have at adolescence of the purely accidental nature of their rank rapidly gives way among very pretty young girls to a sensation of innate, natural, and instinctive superiority, which places them completely outside, and far above, the rest of mankind. Everyone around her having as their objective to spare her all difficulties, and to satisfy the least of her desires, a very pretty young girl effortlessly comes to consider the rest of the world as made up of so many servants, herself having the sole task of maintaining her own erotic value—in the expectation of meeting a boy worthy of receiving her homage”.

Like this:

Wikipedia :The uncanny valley is the hypothesis that human replicas which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit feelings of eeriness and revulsion among some observers.

So, a robot should look like a robot. If it’s too close of a human being (“near realistic but imperfect”), it’ll be rejected. Because, probably, your instinct sees something slightly wrong, and therefore the robot seems ILL.

Of course, it’s interesting to try to understand how it works, because it’s more subtle than that. And also : what are the ways to avoid this uncannyness? Can people get used to it?